4 Poems
Catherine Wagner
THE AUTONOMY OF ART HAS ITS ORIGINS IN THE
CONCEALMENT OF LABOR
My heart beat very hard by itself.
from INFRARES
Whence this yellow page?
Aha! a sun trap, mid-notebook, slept agog.
The first
word on the yellow page is to be unctuous
BIRDPILE.
“BIRDPILE” in flight? or
grounded (dead)?
Meaning
brutally dragged in.
CATHERINE WAGNER’s latest book is Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012). She teaches at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her son Ambrose.
from INFRARES
And we return to the question of the integration of color. “Integration,” heard aloud, contains within it “gray.” A sludgy neutral fades. Integration contains the word “shun.” I am going to go underground and see what colors there are down there Mines & Everyones. I wake up and write continuously With short pauses
I PRONOMIAL
deride and pony consciousness into halflit stable. One rides a horse to go somewhere, of course. The actual is flickering a binary between word and not-word. I said I needed to have the end ofthe word for next. But I did not needit. Next comes anyway whatever you say. I and time were made for/of each other.